Faith

Human beings need to believe. It’s a fact. Faith is essential in our lives. Otherwise, we are nothing but tissue and bones. But what are the things which we have faith in? An easy one: God. Ok, accepted. He will never show up. We don’t even know exactly where he is, what he does and what he doesn’t. It’s a mystery. Verdict: passed. It’s fine to have faith in God.

Then, you can have more or less faith in yourself, in your husband/wife, in friends, family, etc. And that’s the end of the list. Because faith is what endures against the worst: death, destruction, hopelessness, discourage, disappointment. When there is nothing left to believe in, faith makes its most valuable appearance: in spite of the emptiness and darkness around you, you keep on going, moving forward.

It’s impossible to speak about faith in Society, since there is no subject, but crowds. You find faith in the deepest levels of your soul, something a society can’t have. So when any event is taking place in the context of society, we must be careful to talk about faith and beliefs. In fact, it’s even dangerous to speak about emotions, feelings, spirit, soul referring to society. It means to assign spiritual aspects to an entity, a concept, an outcome. Society is the environment of reason, of speculation, of objectivism, or supra-subjetivism. When human subjective attributes are applied to society, it’s obligatory metaphoric language.

When is this metaphoric language applied to society then?

When some, many, all of its individuals express a feeling, an emotion, all together, which doesn’t mean at all that the group is experimenting an emotion as a being.

As Society, we must balance its’ results, its’ means, its’ ends. And in this assessments we must leave emotions, faith, spirit, set aside.

The context of the individual is utterly different to that of society. It is said that societies have a purpose, but that is not correct from an epistemological point of view. When a society “makes” a decision, what really happens is that its individuals make a decision, and by previous agreement, by some kind of “method” the collective expression of all individuals involved becomes decision.

But since individuals DO have an emotional, irrational side, when they decide, we must take this aspect into account simultaneously, when analyzing any social event. For the individuals obviously have a total influence in the final outcome.

This must be well known by sociologists, and definitely even more by those sociologists who work for those who need forecasts and visions of what a society would do, how would it react, under certain circumstances.

What this means is that if someone puts his/her aims at the beginning and wants to achieve it, he/she will try to drive individuals in order to assure that they will respond as expected. When we are rational we are unpredictable. When emotional, on the contrary, highly predictable. Therefore, we have to make huge efforts as individuals, to maintain the spiritual, emotional and affectionate side of our beings out of social events, where a decision is being required from us, i.e.: Democracy and voting.

Express feelings in any sport match is fine, it’s good for you, and irrelevant for society.

2 Responses to “Faith”

>> It’s impossible to speak about faith in Society, since there is no subject, but crowds.

Actually, I think it does make sense to talk about Society as an organism — one in which we can have faith, or not.

You said a society is nothing but crowds of people. I reply that the brain is nothing but crowds of neurons.

Just as neurons are organized into brains that have personalities, so people organize themselves into societies that have character. We can have faith in a person, or not, and we can have faith in a society, or not.

Well, I find it really interesting and challenging to apply individual models or biological models to a “large scale organism”, like societies.

I usually get puzzled when I read very educated people express their admiration on how Nature “designs” perfection in species, in environments, etc., when Nature actually does not have any intention or purpose at all (obviously, from my point of view).

In a similar type of approach, I still find difficult to understand that a Society has a “will”, a purpose, an intention, although there will always be an outcome, a result.

But my point is not if we can have faith in society (which we obviously can or cannot) it’s more the other way round: if Societies can “have” faith, hope, experience happiness, as a whole.